Online banking and account management, as well as online shopping applications, are becoming increasingly pervasive. Many banking institutions or merchants offer websites for these activities, which allow end-users to access their bank accounts and records and to purchase merchandise online. In addition, these institutions typically attempt to add value to their websites by providing value added services to end users, which can entice the end users with offers, promotions, features, services, loan and credit applications, and the like (referred to herein as “products”). Banking institutions and/or merchants can engage another financial institution having a payment system/network to provide such added value. In some cases, these financial institutions can develop customized applications to be used by partner banking institutions and/or merchants. The applications are generally web-based applications that can be hosted by the financial institution and are implemented on the financial institutions servers.
These customized application solutions for the banking institutions and/or merchants can be burdensome and expensive to develop and are generally an inefficient use of resources. What is desired is a platform from which composite applications can be developed by assembling and customizing products within parameters defined by the financial institution and without requiring the user to develop code for the individual applications that form the composite application or code that defines an appearance, interaction, and behavior of the composite application.